Dinosaurs & Digital Depression

It seems my daughter has taken an interest in her father's lifelong love of dinosaurs. When Boom was young he was banned from the school library because he always took out dinosaur books all the time. So he took one without borrowing once, and forgot about it. He doesn't know what happened to it, but he does remember studying those books with a passion only the young full of curiosity possess.

And now Pumpkin is in love with The Land Before Time, The Ice Age, and the book Oh My! Oh My! Oh DINOSAURS!. She's loved the book since the beginning, the Land Before Time the first time she saw it. And when just recently she watched The Ice Age, she proceeded to watch it 20 more times that week.

Tonight I was hoping to visit with my BIL and his girlfriend and their new baby, but they wanted some time alone, so I'm alone tonight, as well. Boom is watching a basketball game that "his" boys are playing in (he doesn't go to many at all, so I don't mind.)

But I'm lonely, anyway. I like going to visit people, and I wanted company tonight. They didn't tell me until 5 that they weren't going to get together, so I was hoping all day that we were. Good thing we had a good night last night getting Little Caeser's Pizza (cheapest around, no Papa John's, so we can't be choosy) and watching Survivor (yes, I'm one of THOSE people.)

But I've been depressed for a week or so now. I get sucked into the vacuum of friendlessness and I can't get out. I have kids and a husband who need me all the time, and others who don't need me at all. I pulled too much here, not enough there. I feel worthless.

And to top it off, I can't progress in my ceramic pursuit because it turns out we need an electrical overhaul to get the right amperage in our house, and since it might be pricey we'll probably try to get it with the grant money along with the sewage that's getting put in, but in order to do so we can't do the work until the grant is approved, which won't be until late May at the earliest, which means I probably won't have a kiln working until Summer, at the soonest.

And I could keep making stuff, but the chances of them getting broken are great since I don't have tons of shelf space (though Boom did build me a nice shelf for starters) and I don't want to risk transporting again. So I feel stuck there, too.

On a lighter note, we are way behind technologically in this house. The only reason we have a DVD player is because last Christmas we used a Baby Gift Card for SEARS to buy a DVD player (trust me, he'll appreciate it more than the two outfits we could have bought instead.) But our computer, a hand-me-down from my dad, which is newer than my laptop from college, is so old that we can't download music from the web, I can't get blogging stuff to work with Microsoft Word, and I can't get those programs that organize and upload pics to the web to work right on it. Maybe some of it is other stuff besides the old age of our computer, but I can't tell.

Anyway, tonight I noticed that even my daughter will start noticing our lack of up-to-datedness. I took a picture of the two of them eating at our kitchen counter, using my 35mm camera, the only one I have. After I took the picture, Pumpkin frowns and says, "Mommy, I want to see my picture!"

Now, 20 years ago or so this may have meant a poloroid, and a few years ago this would have been mistaken for a request to see the developed picture instantly, but I know it actually means that most of our friends and family have digital cameras and enjoy showing all the toddlers their own picture that they just took.

So even my three year old knows that we are behind the times, and for her sake, I'll try to change that in the next, oh, decade, or so.